Real-Life Zombie Encounters

I don’t want to alarm anyone, but I think the zombie apocalypse has already begun. Knowing how long it takes for people to actually notice and respond to things, I wouldn’t be surprised if the apocalypse actually started hundreds of years ago and has been ongoing. Then again, maybe zombies have always been living among us, and I was unfortunate enough to have stumbled across some. Honestly, it’s probably been more than a year since my last zombie sighting, so I might just be overreacting, and the apocalypse isn’t catching.

I’m still kind of in denial about the whole zombie thing. I don’t really want to believe myself, and I’m not really interested in causing a panic or trying to get anyone to believe me — that would be counterproductive. I’d rather spend my time getting as much time in before the zombie apocalypse — seriously, chill out. Anyway, here’s the thing. I made a list of signs that would make it pretty clear that a person were a zombie, and I decided a select person would have to have at least four such traits to potentially be a zombie, and they’d have to have six to eight of them to probably be a zombie.

Some of the qualities I listed were: lolling head, uncontrollable drooling, stiff limbs, staggering movement, unintelligible speech or moaning, inability to make eye contact, unresponsive to verbal inquiries, rotting or peeling flesh, smells of fresh dirt or decaying flesh, and a few others. Over a period of about two weeks, I spotted at least three separate individuals who exhibited seven or eight of the signs — thankfully none that had rotting flesh or smelled — but the extent to which they other signs manifested was … uncanny.